I walks out into the water and goes to swimming. I have the stick in my fist old man Crocky had aimed to use and had left at the fish house. It was big around as my fist, and whittled to a point at both ends. I swims out a ways more. Directly here comes the alligator, starting in to meet me. He’s got his jaws open. I swims up to him and feeds him the stick.

I jobbed it straight up and down in his mouth to where he couldn’t close it. The alligator commences rolling and I stayed with him, rolling too. Him with his mouth held open, it didn’t pleasure him, rolling, no more than me. When he quits, I slings one leg over the back of his neck, and here we go, me riding the alligator.

I give him plenty of room. I knowed he wouldn’t sink with me, for a ’gator’s got sense, and he knowed he’d drown hisself with his mouth open. I put my hands over his eyes so he couldn’t see where he was going. I guided him thisaway and that just as good as if I’d been riding a halter-broke mule. The way I turned him, I’d job my thumb in one of his eyes. He’d swing t’other way to try and break his eye loose.

I can just remember, dimlike, the crowd a-cheering and the niggers screaming. I rode the daggone alligator out of Lake Lochloosy and plumb up on shore.

You can see how come it to happen. ’Twasn’t nothing in the world but the banana brandy. I didn’t have no intention of riding no alligator. I ain’t the man you belong to talk to at all. You go talk to some of them fellers that has hunted alligators. I just naturally don’t know nothing about ’em.

A Plumb Clare Conscience

’Shiner Tim was missing.

He had left his cabin in the piney-woods, without food, without money, without a gun, and he had not returned.

Fifteen years of ’shining have scraped his Cracker ribs through tight places. Revenue agents have found and destroyed his still time and again. But a few hours after, he is usually home, personally undamaged, ready to set another mash when the horizon shall be clear of the federal storm. This he attributes to his far ancestry of Carolina Irish. He is “mostly Irish,” he says.

“Like a bird-dog. Times, he’s brown and white; times, he’s black and white, or mixed-like; times, he’s got a leetle collie in him, or a leetle hound. But that’s what he is, mostly bird-dog.”